Conversations with Bill Kristol

Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, Fred Kagan is a foreign policy strategist and military historian. In this conversation, Kagan and Kristol discuss the strategy for the troop surge in Iraq in 2006/07, which Kagan helped devise. The two also consider the state of the U.S. military today, including how it operates in wartime, how it educates its cadets, and how it interacts with civilians.

This is the third conversation in our ongoing series with the distinguished Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield. In this conversation, Harvey Mansfield and William Kristol explore the distinctive characteristics of our two political parties. Kristol and Mansfield also consider Tocqueville, Machiavelli, and the limits of science—what Mansfield calls “rational control”—in modern politics.

In this conversation, Gingrich gives an inside account of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The former speaker also recalls his first political campaigns and how he began to influence Washington in the 1980s. Finally, Gingrich offers a personal take on mentors, allies, and rivals, including Gerald Ford, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—as well as his reflections on presidents from Eisenhower to Obama.

Jim Manzi is the founder and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, a software company that enables businesses to design and conduct large-scale experiments, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In this conversation, Kristol and Manzi discuss how scientific trial-and-error might help us develop better business and policy practices. The two also reflect on the limits of science in politics and offer a modest defense of social science experimentation for policy making.

Ruth Wisse is Research Professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Tikvah Fund. In this conversation, Kristol and Wisse discuss the politics of anti-Semitism, why Israel is under attack in our universities, and the study of Yiddish literature. Wisse explains the nature of modern anti-Semitism and why it is best understood as a political phenomenon. She also reflects on a lifetime of teaching Yiddish literature, and discusses why we should read its great works.